Dream Interpretation, Therapy, Transformation

What To Do When You Cannot Remember Your Dreams

I don’t remember my dreams. In all of the dream meetings that I have done in the past 15 years this is the statement I hear the most often. How can I remember my dreams better? Why don’t I remember my dreams? I don’t dream.

Here are some things that might help.

1. Dreams are a form of communication from the realm of the absolute positive potential energy (e.g. the spiritual realm) through the human mind so that you can actualize the most important potentiality in your life right now. A lot of the science of dreaming comes from the idea that they come from your own mind, but I have just found that you can make more dramatic changes in your life when you believe that the dreams emanate from a higher source or a perfect inner source. Dream content is just too perfect for your life to be from your own feeble brain. A great many people that I meet don’t want to believe that the Creator has their best interests in mind. They cannot submit to the message in the dream because they have experienced a lot of abuse of power from higher authority in their families, in the secular world, and in their religious leaders. If you are in this category where you have a basic mistrust of authority, you can replace your current images of what the divine is, which for most people in the western world is a white man with a beard living in the sky, to believing that there an extremely beneficent source of absolute positive energy that has your best interest in mind. When I came to the understanding that the dreams were perfect for that particular moment in time for my life to work, I just started being able to make changes in my life at a much more accelerated rate. It helps me to believe that they are not from me but go through me. What helped my thinking was this. The Divine has a plan for me which is much better than my own plan for myself. It is very frightening notion for a lot of people in the West especially Americans because the success of the American nation was built on a basic mistrust of authority despite the fact that the money says, “In God We Trust.” You can consider the possibility that if you do not remember your dreams, you have some trust issues. It is not uncommon. People tend to stop believing in God when authority figures act in an abusive manner. They replace their belief in God with relying on material things and being stable financially. They turn away from everything that is considered a spiritual phenomenon. Dreams are in that category.

Ironically, I have had some Christians tell me that studying dreams is a satanic practice despite the fact that one of the greatest heroic figures in the Bible was Joseph, who was a dream interpreter. Allowing your dreams to be a source of guidance for your life when you cannot remember them usually means that you have mistrust of authority issues. So the first real key to remembering your dreams is to ask when and how you have been abused by authority figures. As soon as you are able to answer the question you will run into fear.

2. Fear of authority cuts off memory. In Malaysia there has recently appeared in the newspapers articles about a group of Muslim women who believe that if their husbands are cheating on them by having extramarital affairs, it is the woman’s fault, that they need to do more in the way of being obedient to their husbands and then dress in sexy clothes and do whatever he wants. As bizarre as this may seem to the majority of people especially in the West it is the various corollaries of this type of thinking that cause us to lose our memories and forget our dreams. Wherever there is any type of inequality in a relationship then then tendency for the person who feels smaller in the relationship like the employee to the employer, wife to husband, child to parent, is to seek the good pleasure of one regarded as higher. When the higher authority has little regard for the one who feels smaller, then it creates a fear reaction in them, the fear of displeasing the authority which could lead to some form of abusive action. This fear causes you to forget your own true self, your own inner plans, and to forget that the one who is really in charge is the Creator. The fear of displeasing authority causes you to focus on what the authority wants for you rather than what the divine world wants for your true self. Your focus is taken off of your true path so you have no memory of it and no memory of the communication that is going to get you on the path.

In a lot of the countries in the East the husband is considered to be the god of the house who demands absolute obedience, respect, and is free to do as he pleases. Almost every Eastern woman has the experience of not being able to choose her own life path because their fathers or husbands have taken over the role of God and have abused authority for their own selfish aims. They lead a life of forgetfulness because they fear the displeasure of authority and the abuse that the authority dishes out to control others.

So when you have this great fear of displeasing authority figures, you also believe that there is a possibility of getting their good pleasure if you just are a little more obedient or perfect in your life, if you just conform to their wishes a little more, if you just work harder to make them proud of you. So whether you are seeking the good pleasure of authority or you have turned away completely from authority in disgust, the result will be the loss of memory of who you truly are. It is even worse for the abusive authority themselves because they have absolutely no clue of who they really are. In many cases it turns your memory away from spiritual communication because spiritual communication like a dream is associated with bad authority.

3. The answer is reflection or meditation. The biggest fear that abusive authority figures have is when people begin to ask questions. In my experience in the American military questioning was considered a sin. Disobeying an order was the same as treason punishable by death. It is how American soldiers justified killing innocent women and children at My Lai in Vietnam. As soon as you begin reflection by asking questions, your memory starts returning. I am pretty certain that most memory problems in the world have something to do with the fear of authority. But if, for instance, you were a soldier in the trenches in World War 1 or in the jungles of Vietnam, every part of you will be about trying to forget rather than having you remember. The memories just bring up pain so you push the memory of the horrors down and try to forget them. They don’t leave.

The first reflection question is always what am I feeling right now. If you have not done a lot of reflecting, the first feeling will always be fear of displeasing authority. When you know what you are feeling (most people do not know what they are feeling), then it begs the next question. Why am I feeling this way? Reflection means being curious, wondering. Remembering your dreams is equivalent to remembering how you are feeling. When you can remember your own feelings at any moment and be with them, then you can begin remembering who you are and where you are headed. When you cannot remember things like a dream, you can begin to ask questions like who does not want me to question them. It will take you on a wonderful journey of discovery.